Ed Symkus: Jake Gyllenhaal bonds with his character in Demolition’

Ed SymkusMore Content Now

Wednesday

Mar 30, 2016 at 4:19 PMMar 30, 2016 at 4:19 PM

Jake Gyllenhaal is no stranger to playing damaged characters. Not the physically wounded sort, but someone who is or has been emotionally scarred. In “Southpaw,” he was a man who fell from grace and had to battle his way back up. In “Nightcrawler,” he was a morally bankrupt loser who had no clue that he was doing anything wrong. “Prisoners” had him playing a pit bull of a cop who wouldn’t give up on a hopeless kidnapping case. Even way back when he starred in “Donnie Darko,” he played a guy who was so addled, he didn’t know if he actually existed.

“Demolition,” the newest film from director Jean-Marc Vallée, doesn’t even give him a chance to take a breath before the emotional torture begins on his investment banker character Davis Mitchell. In the film’s opening minutes, his wife is killed in a car accident, a horrific crash that he survives. Sent into a tailspin of misery that extends to something as insignificant as a broken vending machine at the hospital where his wife dies, he begins an inner journey that leads to him finding solace or at least release by picking up a sledgehammer and taking part in legal destruction as part of a house demolition team. Gyllenhaal spoke about the film at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Q: Davis is a character who isn’t easy to figure out. How did you go about developing him?

A: There’s an inherent trust in the tone that Jean-Marc is going for from the beginning, and for me there’s a sort of a patience and an insular quality to the character, and a searching in general. The character is on a continuous search, so I made a decision early on where the search for the character was equally as interesting as the search for the actor, and we were kind of working in tandem in that way. What I loved about the film was that it was a story about a guy who begins the movie in the conventional way, and ends the movie through an unconventional journey, feeling however he’s supposed to feel, not how society has told him to feel. So it was really actually a journey, all the time. It was a process.

Q: Is it difficult, as an actor, to portray a man who’s caught up in so much grief?

A: At the beginning of the movie you find that Davis is so far from his own feelings when the tragedy occurs, he has no idea how he feels about it. Then you follow this extraordinarily unconventional story towards his finding out that he’s lost. Most stories about loss or grieving don’t allow for the oddity of that discovery; they’re all about empathizing with the character. In this movie I think you find a more insensitive, awkward person who is just searching for how he feels. He doesn’t know how to express himself, but he knows that he has to, and he’s trying to find out ways to do it. The first time he understands it is by physically taking things apart as opposed to emotionally taking things apart. So there is some sort of physical catharsis for him that eventually leads to an emotional one.

Q: Before it all gets physical, Davis sends a series of hand-written letters of complaint to the vending machine company. Do you, in this day and age, write letters to people?

A: Yes, I have sent hand-written letters to people. I am an actor, but we do know how to write (laughs). I really do think that things that are hand-written are becoming less and less of an importance to certain generations. I think what’s really nice about this story is that it’s not an email. It’s old school in that way. Someone trying to express themselves in a very primal way, by actually writing something, is not happening much anymore. That’s why I loved it. Ironically it feels fresh, because it’s old school.

Q: You’re about to start filming “Stronger,” the film about the Boston Marathon bombing. Are you sworn to silence, or can you talk about it?

A: It’s about Jeff Bauman, who lost his legs in the Marathon bombing. But it doesn’t really have to do with the bombing itself; it’s the love story between Jeff and his now wife, who was then his girlfriend. It’s a beautiful movie. It’s not about the violence or the impact of it, it’s more about how human beings really can triumph.

— Ed Symkus covers movies for More Content Now.

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